The news did not really surprise the public since updates over the spiraling costs of the Tokyo Olympic Station been giving public pressure for quite some time already. The Japanese government has cancelled the plans to build a Zaha Hadid-designed centerpiece stadium for the 2020 Olympics. The said stadium, with its retractable roof and a sky high budget rising to more than $2 billion would have been much bigger than the main venues of the last two summer Olympics and would have been most likely the costliest stadium ever built in history. Japanese Prime minister was straight to the point at a news conference last week saying, "The current plan will go back to being a blank sheet of paper, and we will rethink it from scratch."
The decision came after continuous criticism from the public, including memes that ridiculed of the stadium's design, and a pushback from the architecture community. Edward Suzuki, Toyo ito and Fumihiko Maki involved themselves in the drafting of the petition to alter Hadid's design. While Arata Isozaki described the design "like a turtle waiting for Japan to sink so that it can swim away."
The Hadid Design had long been controversial since it was selected in 2012, even after it had been redesigned to look more compact. It was originally set to be built on the site of the Mitsuo Katayama-designed National Stadium, which was used in the 1964 games. Many critics have branded the 80,000-seat venue too excessive and costly. Hadid believed that the costs are not related to her design and she had called out critics for being unwilling to have a foreigner design the stadium. She told De Zeen Magazine, ""I think it's embarrassing for them, that's all I can say" and she added, "I understand it's their town. But they're hypocrites."
